They said the wrong thing, but it’s your website

It’s the new advertising and it’s viral. Using consumers on the internet to endorse your product through online interaction, often using a competition. But what if your consumers are less than truthful, or breach intellectual property laws? They said it, but it’s your web site.

So we are finding more and more clients wanting to use the on-line media as a primary means of their advertising and marketing activities. So in other words they are really using the web as a means for directly interacting with their customers and one very powerful way of doing that with modern technology is obviously through the internet. We are seeing a lot of organisations either inviting their customers to interact with them through the internet via user generated content that may be posted onto websites. We are also seeing a lot of organisations engaging in trade promotions where they may be encouraging their customers to post a video or photograph or write a story that will be entered into a competition and judged on line. Now well that’s absolutely fine and its quite commonly a very successful strategy to interact with your customers there is certainly is greater scope for the law to be infringed. Particularly in the areas of IP and consumer law where organisations allow customers to post user generated content onto their website and where organisations actually fail to continually monitor what’s actually being posted onto the website.

The area which is critically important is obviously intellectual property, you want to make sure that there is no infringing content that is posted onto your website. So in the copyright area making sure that a lot of these works are original works or all the works in fact are original works that have been posted onto the website to really minimise that risk of third part infringement. In relation to materials that are posted on the site they obviously need to be accurate and not misleading. A very good example that we have seen recently is an allergy company a organisation that manufactured products that alleviate allergies being found to have engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct. Mainly because they allowed content that was posted onto the website to remain on that website they didn’t remove it once they were aware that what was being said was actually false. So really really important that organisations understand exactly what is on the website and rip it off the website if it shows that that material is inaccurate.

So that’s really the front facing area of it. Of course there is no point in having interactions with consumers on line if the level of functionality isn’t actually there in the applications that these consumers are using. So in contracts with IT service providers very important to make sure that they are watertight to make sure that you are getting the service levels that you are expecting and the functionality and the user experience is going to be a good one to maximise the brand reputation.